1. Field
Systems, apparatuses, and methods consistent with exemplary embodiments relate to location tracking of an electronic device, and more particularly, to tracking, by a first electronic device, location information of a second electronic device by using a third electronic device.
2. Description of the Related Art
Location tracking systems can be divided into systems for an indoor environment and systems for an outdoor environment. Location tracking in an indoor environment may be used in various applications. For example, the location of exhibits in a museum can be detected by using a navigation application. That is, a visitor can detect information on a current location of the visitor and the location of exhibits using map information of the museum and personalized navigation information. As another example, the locations of doctors and nurses in a hospital may be shared over a network among hospital staff to improve medical support, particularly in the event of an emergency. As yet another example, an environment in which a shopper can obtain price information, etc. at a current location in a shopping mall or a department store can be created, and thus a business model such as a content providing service can be supported.
Location tracking systems in an indoor environment include vision-based systems using a camera and sensor-based systems using an infrared sensor. However, vision-based systems are disadvantageous because the vision-based systems raise privacy concerns and require heavy computation. Accordingly, sensor-based location tracking systems are actively developed.
Although the sensor-based location tracking systems provide outcomes in tracking a person or a device in a specific environment, the sensor-based location tracking systems require installation of a plurality of devices to operate and require complicated additional hardware in the device to be tracked. Further, the sensor-based location tracking systems fail to provide a user-friendly and quick mechanism to access the location information of another device and constantly track the location of another device. For example, a tracking system implemented using a global positioning system (GPS) suffers from line-of-site issues in that it cannot penetrate through objects (e.g., buildings) to track tagged objects. As a result, the GPS is ill-suited for many applications, such as those requiring tracking of objects below ground. As another example, a tracking system implemented using Bluetooth suffers from drawbacks. For example, Bluetooth is very limited in the number of end nodes that can be attached to a host. It is not uncommon for a Bluetooth network to be limited to about one to about seven devices. As a result, Bluetooth is ill-suited for many applications, such as those requiring increased scalability of the network size.
Conventionally, the tracking systems generate a plurality of signals that can be detected by a tracker unit to indicate the presence of the devices to be tracked. Frequently, users of related art tracking systems have the difficulty of having to use a specially designed device to perform specific tracking functions, which is inconvenient to the users.